“Write what you know” is the most common and most misguided advice every writer receives. Taken literally, which it too often is, WWYK unleashes waves of first-person experiential naval gazing upon the world.
For anyone even remotely familiar with my writing history, it may come across as a bit rich for me to be criticizing WWYK. After all, I launched my professional writing career with a first-person column, “The Back Room,” that started off chronicling the humorous aspects of being a very sexually active young gay man in D.C. (And, as I like to remind anyone within earshot, I was doing this long before Candace Bushnell birthed Sex and the City, which itself launched approximately 100,000 failed weekly column pitches over the course a decade.)
The problem with WWYK is that it stifles imagination. I’m not the first to make this point. Writers far better and more successful than I have noted that WWYK precludes, say, writing about a zombie apocalypse or warping to Alpha Centauri or scori…
